Friday 24 August 2012 17.55 EDT
First published on Friday 24 August 2012 17.55 EDT

In 1927, Ford Madox Ford compared himself to a great auk: that clumsy North Atlantic penguin, hunted to death by the middle of the 19th century. The occasion was the reissue of his first masterpiece The Good Soldier (1915) – his "great auk's egg" – which he had published at the age of 41. Even back then, he maintained, he had felt like an "extinct volcano", one who had had his time and was all too willing to hand over to the "clamorous young writers" of the rising generation. But those new voices – Imagists, Vorticists, Cubists – had been blown away by the first world war, and somehow he was still around. And so, to his own surprise, "I have come out of my hole again" to write more books … Such weary, genteel valetudenarianism was typical of Ford, and probably didn't help his reputation. When he died, in 1940, Graham Greene wrote that it felt like "the obscure death of a veteran – an impossibly Napoleonic veteran, say, whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan".

However, it was and is always a mistake to go along with Ford's self-presentation. He appeared confused and was often confusing; he would say one thing and probably mean another, only to state its opposite as a counter-certainty not very long afterwards; he was fanciful, unreliable and exasperating. Some thought him simply a liar, though as Ezra Pound charitably pointed out to Hemingway, Ford "only lied when he was very tired". So in 1927, for all his self-dismissingness, he was three-quarters of the way through what would become his second masterpiece: the four-book Parade's End (1924-28). A novel which couldn't be further from the work of some superannuated old buffer: in human psychology and literary technique, it is as modern and modernist as they come. And now that the years have shaken down, it is Ford who makes Greene look old-fashioned, rather than the other way round.

The Good Soldier's protagonist, Edward Ashburnham, was a version of the chivalric knight. Parade's End's protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is a version of the Anglican saint. Both are great auks making do in a world of modernity and muddle. Tietjens – a North Yorkshireman whose ancestors came over with "Dutch William" – believes that the 17th century was "the only satisfactory age in England". He is "a Tory of an extinct type" who has "no politics that did not disappear in the 18th century". He reads no poetry except Byron, thinks Gilbert White of Selborne "the last English writer who could write", and approves of only one novel written since the 18th century (not that we can read it, since it is by a character in Parade's End). Both Ashburnham and Tietjens share a streak of romantic feudalism – nostalgia for a time of rights and duties and supposed orderliness. But Ashburnham is better fitted for the modern world, being – beneath his chivalric coating – a devious libertine and not outstandingly bright. Tietjens, by contrast, declares: "I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it." He is also highly intelligent, with an encyclopaedic memory – "the most brilliant man in England", as we are frequently assured in the opening book, Some Do Not. This may be an advantage in the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he number-crunches for England; but isn't such a good idea in the world he inhabits.

There, intelligence is viewed as suspect and chastity weird; virtue as smugness, and saintliness a direct provocation. It is a great audacity for a novelist to begin a long novel with a main character whom very few other characters like, let alone admire. Tietjens is socially awkward, and emotionally reticent to the point of muteness: when, in the book's opening action, his wife Sylvia, having left him four months previously, asks to be taken back, he "seemed to have no feelings about the matter". He is "completely without emotions that he could realize", and "had not spoken more than twenty words about the event". Later, he is said to have a "terrifying expressionlessness". Men sponge off him for both ideas and money; women on the whole find him rebarbative – "his looks and his silences alarmed them". In the course of the novel he is variously compared to a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog and finally a dejected bulldog. He is also likened to a navvy, a sweep, a stiff Dutch doll, and an immense feather mattress. He is "lumpish, clumsy", with "immense hands". His wife constantly imagines him constructed from meal-sacks. Even Valentine Wannop, the spikey suffragette who is eventually to bring this Anglican saint a kind of salvation, initially finds him "as mad as he is odious", with hateful eyes "protruding at her like a lobster's"; she takes him for just another "fat golfing idiot". Still, for all his apparent ineptness, there is one thing always to be said for Christopher Tietjens: he is very good with horses.

Tietjens's notions of love and sex – which you would not expect to be conventional – are summed up at one point as follows: "You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks to her." Which is the exact opposite of one conventional male view, in which "chatting up" with luck leads to sex, and afterwards you wonder what to talk about. (Tietjens's idea is a less engaging version of what Ford himself believed. As he put it, rather more sweetly, in propria persona: "You marry to continue the conversation.") In Tietjens's mind, it is "intimate conversation" which leads to "the final communion of your souls … that in effect was love". The sort of woman such an Anglican saint requires should be "passionate yet circumspect". The second adjective is richly inappropriate for Sylvia, who first seduced him, very uncircumspectly, in a railway carriage.

❦

For Graham Greene, Sylvia Tietjens is "surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel". A wife who is bored, promiscuous and up-to-date, tied to a husband who is omniscient, chaste and antique: there's a marriage made in hell. Christopher is a mixture of chivalry and masochism (if it hurts, I must be doing the right thing); Sylvia a mixture of recklessness and sadism (if it hurts him, I must be doing the right thing). Christopher believes that a gentleman does not divorce his wife, however she behaves; though if she wants to divorce him, he accepts it. He also thinks of Sylvia as a "tremendous discipline" for the soul – rather as being in the French Foreign Legion would be for the body. Sylvia for her part cannot divorce Christopher because she is a Catholic. And so the couple are bound together on a wheel of fire. And the torments she devises for her husband are of exquisite accuracy. When she was 13 (we learn only towards the end of the fourth volume, Last Post) Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten's paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a Sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens's ancestral home – "as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations". Once, she had watched a fish-eagle circling high above a scream of herring-gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image. Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses.

Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband? Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher's very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her. He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view. What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia's than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. She loathes him – for his gentlemanliness and solemnity, his passiveness, his "pompous self-sufficiency", his "brilliance" and the "immorality" of the views which that brilliant mind emits. When her confessor, Father Consett, suggests that "Tout savoir, c'est tout pardonner" she replies that "to know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!" Sylvia is bored by marriage, but even more bored by promiscuity. "All men are repulsive," she assures her mother. And, "man-mad" though she appears, Sylvia treats her lovers with disdain: they are not even worth properly tormenting. "Taking up with a man," she reflects, "was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: 'But I've read all this before'."

And this too, in a way, is her husband's fault. Their relationship is not just about the infliction and the bearing of pain. Key to an understanding of Sylvia are those rare moments when Ford, a profound psychologist, allows us to consider that she is more than just a vengeful spirit possessed by evil. However infuriating Tietjens might be, however "immoral" his views, he is the only truly mature man she has been with, the only one whose conversation can hold her: "As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up." So he has spoiled her for all other men, and must be punished for it. The more so because he is the only one who can still move her. In the middle of France, in the middle of war, when a venomous old French duchess seems about to derail a wedding, Tietjens, applying intelligence, practicality and his "atrocious" old-fashioned French, talks the woman down. Sylvia has been watching, and: "It almost broke Sylvia's heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing." Two and a half novels later, when Tietjens is living with Valentine Wannop and Sylvia has almost reached the bottom of her bag of torments, she imagines confronting her husband's mistress: "But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh, adorable – face of stone." That "oh, adorable" says it all. As far as Sylvia can love, she loves Tietjens; and her rage at him is a function of sexual passion. She still desires him, still wants to "torment and allure" him; but one of the Anglican saint's conditions for her return to the marriage is that he will not sleep with her – a torment in return.

As all this suggests, the emotional level of the novel is high, and often close to hysteria. There is scarcely a character in the book – except, perhaps Marie-Léonie, the Frenchly practical mistress of Christopher's brother Mark – who is not described at one time or another as being mad, or on the verge of madness. Only one – Captain McKechnie – seems positively certifiable, but for most, "normality" means a kind of nerve-strained semi-madness. We might expect, for instance, that Valentine, the emotional counterweight to Sylvia, the virgin to her adulteress, who shares so much with Tietjens – they are both Latinists with "bread-and-butter brains", both "without much of the romantic" to them, both lovers of frugality – you would have thought that she at least would have a healthy mind in her undoubtedly healthy body. But even she finds her nerves constantly on edge and her mind slipping: her head "seems to contain two balls of strings being separately unwound". At one point, she barks an order to her own panicky thoughts: "Steady the Buffs!" The mind at work is like a regiment under fire, and about to relocate; but where is it going, and who is leading it, and will it survive?

❦

The middle two volumes of the novel are spent at the western front. Other, more conventional novelists might have set the madness of war against the calm and balm of love and sex; Ford knows more and sees deeper. War and sexual passion are not opposites: they are in the same business, two parts of the same pincer attack on the sanity of the individual. It is not at first obvious how saturated Parade's End is with sex – with memories of it, hopes for it, and rumours about it. (The novel is masterly on the workings of gossip, and the way it gets poisonously out of hand. By the fourth volume, the rumours about the Tietjens brothers have grown to the point where the pair of them are viewed as "notorious libertines" and Mark said to be dying of syphilis. The objective reader can count up the number of women the brothers appear to have slept with in their entire lives: three between the two of them.) The central emotional and sexual vortex is that involving Sylvia, Christopher and Valentine. But the lives of lesser characters, even those who are specks at the periphery of the reader's vision, are also endlessly disrupted and twisted by sex. There is O Nine Morgan, who applies for home leave because his wife is having an affair with a prize-fighter; Tietjens, having heard that the boxer will kill Morgan if he turns up in Wales, refuses the request. So, instead of being beaten to death, O Nine is blown to bits in the trenches: sex gets him either way. Elsewhere, sergeants' wives take up with Belgians; a cook ruins his career by going awol because of his "sister"; an RSM wants a commission because the "bad boys" who "monkey" with his wild daughter back home will be more careful if she's an officer's daughter; while Captain McKechnie keeps getting home leave to divorce, and then not divorcing ("That's modernism," growls General Campion). Sylvia's brusque view of the military is that "You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women." She regards the war as an agapemone (a place where free love is practised), and as "an immense warlock's carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties".

But no one in the novel gets sex, and sexual passion, right. Sex is almost always damaging and disastrous – to the extent that the businesslike relationship between Mark and Marie-Léonie seems almost normal, until you consider that in the 13 years she has been his mistress she has never known "what his Office was nor where his chambers, nor even his surname". Towards the very end of the novel there is a walk-on (or rather, ride-on) part for Christopher and Sylvia's son. He is just a downy boy, if one beginning to feel the allure of an older woman; but he is old enough to have witnessed his mother at work on various men. And what is this ingenu's early conclusion on the whole matter? "But wasn't sex a terrible thing." Nor does the instinct just do for human beings. Christopher, on a balmy day in the Seine valley, the war for once distant, hears a skylark singing so far out of season that he concludes "the bird must be over-sexed". Two novels later, his brother Mark, lying awake, hears nightingales producing not their normal, beautiful sound, but something much coarser, which seems to him to contain abuse of other males, and boastfulness to their own sitting hens. It is the sound, in his phrase, of "sex ferocity".

Greene wrote that "The Good Soldier and the Tietjens series seem to me almost the only adult novels dealing with the sexual life that have been written in English. They are our answer to Flaubert." In subject-matter, certainly; but also there is also a consanguinity in technique. One of Flaubert's great developments (not inventions – no one really invents anything in the novel) was style indirect libre, that way of dipping into a character's consciousness – for a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, sometimes for just a single word – showing things from his or her point of view, and then dipping out again. This is a direct ancestor of the stream-of-consciousness narrative so richly deployed by Ford. Much of Parade's End takes place within the heads of its characters: in memory and anticipation, reflection, misunderstanding and self-justification. Few novelists have better understood and conveyed the overworkings of the hysterical brain, the underworkings of the damaged brain (after his first spell at the front, Tietjens returns with partial memory loss), the slippings and slidings of the mind at the end of its tether, with all its breakings-in and breakings-off.

The name Freud occurs only once, on Sylvia's lips: "I … pin my faith on Mrs Vanderdecken [a society role model]. And Freud." She doesn't elucidate, though we might reasonably deduce that he provides her with some theoretical justification for what Tietjens calls "her high-handed divagations from fidelity". But Freud is more widely present, if – since this is a very English novel – in a subtle, anglicised form: "In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other." The word "subconscious" is never used; instead, Tietjens at one point has been "thinking with his undermind". Later, Valentine had always known something "under her mind"; Tietjens refers to "something behind his mind"; while General Campion "was for the moment in high good humour on the surface, though his subordinate minds [sic] were puzzled and depressed". Ford moves between these levels of the mind as he moves between fact and memory, certainty and impression. Tietjens compares the mind to a semi-obedient dog. Nor is it just mind, memory and fact that are slipping and sliding; it is the very language used to describe them. General Campion, one of the least hysterical of characters, is driven to wonder, "What the hell is language for? We go round and round."

The narrative also goes round and round, backtracking and criss-crossing. A fact, or an opinion, or a memory will be dropped in, and often not explained for a dozen or a hundred pages. Sometimes this may be a traditional cliffhanger: a character left in a state of emotional crisis while the novel ducks off for 50 or 60 pages at the western front. More often, the device becomes something much more individual and Fordian. An explosive piece of information, murderous lie or raging emotional conclusion might casually be let drop, whereupon the narrative will back off, as if shocked by anything stated with such certainty, then circle around, come close again, back off again, and finally, approach it directly. The narrative, in other words, is acting as the mind often works. This can confuse, but as VS Pritchett said of Ford, "Confusion was the mainspring of his art as a novelist. He confused to make clear." To say that a great novel needs reading with great attention is somewhere between a banality and an insult. But it applies particularly to Parade's End. It will be a very rare reader who does not intermittently look up from the page to ask: "But did I know that? Have we been told that already or not?" In what sense did Christopher "kill" his father? Did we know that Mrs Macmaster was even pregnant, let alone that she had lost a child? Have we been told Tietjens is under arrest? That his stepmother died of grief when Sylvia left him? That Macmaster was dead? Has Mark really been struck dumb? And so on, confusingly and clarifyingly, to the very end.

Since nothing is simple with Ford, one of the unsimple things about Parade's End is the status and quality of the fourth volume, Last Post. When editing the Bodley Head edition of Ford (1962-63), Greene simply omitted it, thus reducing a quartet to a trilogy. He thought the book "was more than a mistake – it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade's End". He charged it with sentimentality, and with damagingly clearing up "valuable ambiguities" by bringing them into "the idyllic sunshine of Christopher's successful escape into the life of a Kentish small-holder".

Half a century on, it's hard to see Last Post as having delayed "a full critical appreciation" of Parade's End. Cyril Connolly, in The Modern Movement (1965), followed Greene by referring to Ford's "war trilogy" (though, far from newly appreciating it as such, he patronisingly dismissed the whole book); but most subsequent editors have chosen to view it as a quartet rather than trilogy. And over those years, the reputation of both Ford and the novel itself have remained pretty much what they always have been. Ford enthusiasts are ever in the minority and ever undeterred. To be a Fordite is rather like being a member of one of those volunteer groups who help restore Britain's canal system. You run into them, muddy and sweaty, spending their Sunday afternoons digging out some long-disused arm which once brought important goods to and from, say, Wendover. You are fairly sure that they are doing a good thing, but unless you jump down and get muddy yourself, the virtue of the task, indeed of the whole canal system, might well escape you.

There is a clear structural argument in favour of Last Post: the first volume of the quartet is set before the war and the middle two during it; so a fourth, postwar volume makes sense. But it's also true that if, when you got to the end of the third volume, A Man Could Stand Up –, you were told that this was the last Ford ever had to say about Tietjens, you would not necessarily be shocked or disappointed. That novel ends in the chaos of armistice night 1918, with a proper mêlée of the drunk and the half-mad, of celebration and high anxiety, of possible new beginnings, and of Tietjens and Valentine at last together, dancing. Six pages before the end of the third volume, she has smiled at him for the first time. And the novel's final line, from inside Valentine's head, is a typical and brilliant Fordian aposiopesis: "She was setting out on …"

It could end there. We could imagine to ourselves what she (and Tietjens) were setting out on – and it would, no doubt, be that life they separately and together dreamed of, a life of talking, talking, of continuing the conversation; also of an escape from the past, and war, and madness, and Sylvia. That is probably what we would write for the two of them. What Ford in fact wrote is different, and more complicated, and darker, and really not very much as Greene describes it. "The idyllic sunshine of Christopher's successful escape into the life of a Kentish small-holder." In fact, it's West Sussex, not Kent, and Christopher is more a furniture-dealer than a smallholder; but let that pass. "Idyllic", "successful"? Well, Christopher the saint is still being cheated by the world's wicked, he and Valentine (plus Christopher's mute, paralysed brother Mark and his mistress, now wife, Marie-Léonie) get by financially thanks only to occasional windfalls and some effective French housekeeping. Valentine has patched clothes and collapsing underwear, and for all their shared ambition of frugality she finds it hard going. Anxieties are not reduced (Valentine, having secured Tietjens, is now constantly worried about losing him), a sense of madness is never far away; and hovering over their supposedly idyllic escape is the fish-eagle Sylvia, thinking up further revenges on not just her estranged husband but also his pregnant girlfriend and paralysed brother.

Ford structures this grim continuation with characteristic boldness. The first half is mediated through the non-speaking Mark, who recapitulates and reorders and re-examines the past; then we are much with Sylvia as she plans fresh revenges and her own social advancement; also with Marie-Léonie as she bottles cider; then, a little, towards the end, with Valentine. And so, through this final volume, there mounts the increasing question: where is Christopher Tietjens? He is often referred to, but his presence and point of view are conspicuously and risingly absent until the last two pages when he returns, worn out, from a failed attempt to save the Great Tree of Groby (no "success" there). Where is this idyll with Valentine? It exists only in the siting of the house, with a view of four counties, in its neat horticulture, its woods and hedges. The surroundings may be idyllic, but any romance lies strictly in nature not humankind. Where is that talking, that continued conversation? Not in Last Post – nor is there any back-reference to its having already occurred. Sylvia may furiously envy the household for having found "peace", but the reader witnesses little of this; it may all be in Sylvia's fantasy.

Consider the only scene which shows Tietjens and Valentine together, in those final two pages. He returns from Yorkshire carrying "a lump of wood" (it is "aromatic", so presumably a chunk of the Great Tree). Valentine's greeting consists of a rebuke for his incompetence as an antiques dealer: he has foolishly left some coloured prints in an unwanted jar which he had given away to another dealer. "How could you? How could you? How are we going to feed and clothe a child if you do such things?" She tells him to go off and get them back at once. Mark (now speaking again) points out to her that "the poor devil's worn out". But this appeal has no effect. Then:

Heavily, like a dejected bulldog, Christopher made for the gate. As he went up to green path beyond the hedge, Valentine began to sob.

"How are we to live? How are we ever to live?"

Is this an idyllic escape? There is more than a hint that Tietjens's inept saintliness is bringing out the scold in Valentine. The fish-eagle silhouette of Sylvia may have finally fled the sky (though she has changed her mind so often in the past that who is to say that her private armistice will last?); but Ford allows us to imagine that, just as the anxious will always find new anxieties to replace the old, so a tormented saint, freed from his persecutor, might yet bring upon himself a new tormentor in the unlikeliest of shapes. Anglican saints were always hunted to extinction, just like great auks.

• Parade's End is currently on BBC2 on Fridays at 9pm. Julian Barnes has written the introduction to the Penguin Classic